


Purple Skies and BLTs

by WontGetDown



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos is pretty oblivious, Gen, Night Vale, in which a human being (possibly) is compared to a sandwich (definitely)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 18:28:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WontGetDown/pseuds/WontGetDown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos’s first impression of Night Vale is that the sky is electric purple, and that’s terrifying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Purple Skies and BLTs

Carlos’s first impression of Night Vale is that the sky is electric purple, and that’s terrifying.

          His second impression, as he and his team of scientists consume lunch at a small local eatery, is that all of the advertisements on the radio seem to be done by the same man – the same man with the same deep, sonorous voice that would almost border on being monotonous if it wasn’t for the sudden excited lilt that it occasionally took up. This change in tone often took place at inappropriate (in Carlos’s opinion) times, such as his enthusing about how Rico’s Pizza was often frequented by “mysterious hooded figures.” In Carlos’s experience, mysterious hooded figures tended to hail either from gangs or Renaissance fairs, and were rarely a good thing in either case.

          Upon asking after the identity of the voice’s owner, Carlos was informed with a flare of pride that such was “the voice of Night Vale,” a man the community was simultaneously proud to have and surprised that he was not yet dead. Really, he should have been taken care of by the sheriff’s secret police some time ago. If not them, then it was at least entirely remarkable how well he seemed to get on with the hooded figures – why, they even visited his studio very occasionally, and as yet he had not disappeared under strange and suspect circumstances or even been hauled off to the old abandoned mine shaft for indefinite imprisonment. All of these, apparently, were things that had happened to a number of people for significantly slighter offenses than the ones Cecil Baldwin was notorious for committing, whether intentionally or not.

          All of this was very startling information to Carlos and his team of scientists, who were still a little on edge about the oddly-colored sky as well as the fact that one of the scientists had found a whole eyelash – like, one of those fake ones, only real – in his soup. Upon the scientist expressing alarm and disgust at this discovery and drawing it to the attention of the wait staff, the restaurant employees had adopted the attitude that Carlos and his team were “super offensive” and “really, a reaction of that sort over a bit of soup garnish!” and had subsequently hustled them out into the street, where they became even more disturbed by the fact that the purple sky was now bleeding into a garish orange-tinted shade of teal approaching from the east.

          Carlos spent the next several hours taking measurements on a variety of handheld instruments, muttering to himself in an agitated fashion, and running a hand repeatedly through his hair. His hair had begun to irritate him; despite his relatively young age, it had begun to gray at the temples from science-related stress (as well as an unfortunate chemical explosion a few years back that only seemed to be affecting him now), and quite frankly it was getting a bit long for his taste.

          It was late in the afternoon when there was a polite knock on the door of the lab, which Carlos and his team of scientists were still putting together. Rather than knock and come in, however, the person stayed outside and continued knocking in sharp, brief intervals until a slightly confused Carlos told them to come inside.

          Upon receiving permission to enter, the door swung open and a very strange man popped inside. Appearance-wise, he was put together as if someone had checked every box on the “ethnicity” section of a college application and then thrown the results into a blender set on “chunky” for a little too long. This made for a very strange assortment of features that, when thought about and looked at individually, did not fit together at all, but when looked at as a conjunctive whole, fit together in a surprisingly attractive way – rather like the individual ingredients of a recipe vs. the finished dish. Carlos, for example, despised tomatoes on their own, but was inordinately fond of a good B.L.T.

          The man before him, if not examined too closely, was a B.L.T.

          Wide eyes with dark circles underneath regarded Carlos in an explosion of expressive color through glasses frames that had no lenses in them. There was a long moment of silence that encompassed the newcomer’s total infatuation with the sight of Carlos, as well as Carlos’s increasing discomfort and sense of edginess that nothing about the town of Night Vale was working to dissipate.

          “Well, listeners,” uttered the stranger to himself, and as the familiar sonorous voice filled the lab Carlos was briefly struck with the horrifying impression that the air around the man had momentarily flickered into static and back again. “ _Well_.”

-FIN-

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first Night Vale fic and I think it went pretty well, considering that I just discovered it two days ago! I greatly enjoy Carlos and his immense concern over Night Vale and its improbability. Also it is my favorite thing for him to be science-ing it up and completely oblivious to Cecil fangirling over him. I'm sure he'll find out soon enough.
> 
> The eyelash was initially an eyeball, but then I listened to Episode 19B and decided that eyeballs were probably more of a Desert Bluffs thing and changed it.


End file.
